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Singleminded DHCP

I had a working network (Mandrake 9.0 kernel 2.4.19) until I installed a proxy server (Squid) to share a broadband connection. In my tinkering with the proxy, I must have changed something DHCP needs because now my DHCP server gives out the same IP address to every workstation. As you might imagine, this is not good for the network. The workstations are all clones of a setup machine, so they're identical, but they have been getting unique IP addresses previously, so I don't think that's the problem. I have checked dhcpd.conf, dhcpcd.conf, ifcfg-eth0, dhcpd.leases, and any other files I could find that looked remotely interesting, and I've googled my fingers down to stubs, but no luck.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

By the way, my one Windows machine seems to get a unique IP from the low end of the range while all my Linux boxes get the same IP from the top end of the range.

Found it!

Thanks for looking. I had installed a fresh clone on all the workstations. The clone had a dhcpcd cache, so when a workstation boots, it requests its "previous" IP. Even though there is a different MAC (hwaddr), dhcpd gives it the lease it requested.

Solution: start the workstation. Kill the dhcp client with "dhcpcd -k" which will release the IP lease and dump the cache. Then restart with "ifup eth0" and a new lease is assigned. ...OR... use "dhcpcd -k" on the set-up machine BEFORE you clone it. Then it doesn't have the cache and the new clones will get fresh leases of their own.